Minn. Board To Consider Desegregation Plan

Heavily white school districts near the Twin Cities would be
required to attract minority students and insure that they soon achieve
on a par with their new peers, under a proposal before the Minnesota
state board of education this week.

The rules would require districts in the Minneapolis-St.Paul
metropolitan area with enrollments that are less than 10 percent or
more than 30 percent minority to adopt plans for bringing about
voluntary desegregation.

Currently, 59 percent of Minneapolis students and 49 percent of St.
Paul students are members of minority groups. Minority enrollments in
suburban areas generally are considerably lower.

The proposal gives districts an incentive to receive low-income
minority students by raising the amount of compensatory state aid
allocated to each poor child in Minneapolis and St. Paul. These
children, who currently are allocated an extra 65 percent in state aid,
would have their state-aid allowances raised to twice the amount
provided for other students.

Schools would be required, however, to develop plans to eliminate
any performance gaps between minority and majority students. They would
face reconstitution--a shake-up of their entire administration and
faculty--if they failed after three years to equalize dropout and
discipline rates, academic achievement, and enrollment in remedial,
special-education, and honors classes.

To address the social factors contributing to student-performance
gaps, the proposal calls for the Metropolitan Council, which represents
municipalities in seven counties in the Twin Cities area, to develop a
new plan for addressing economic discrimination and housing
segregation.

"We wanted to build into the proposed rule language that deals not
only with access, but outcomes,'' said Elaine J. Salinas, an
education-program officer for the Urban Coalition, one of several
advocacy groups that helped draft the proposed changes before the
board.

"The thing that we really tried to battle,'' she said, "was this
attitude that has been in public education for a long time, that
because a child is low income or of color, we don't have to expect as
much of them--that they are not capable of performing at a high
level.''

Funding Questions

The board established a task force of education officials, community
leaders, and advocacy-group representatives to develop the plan.

John Plocker, the president of the board, said last week that the
resulting plan enjoys strong support on the board.

But even if the plan wins the board's approval, it still must gain
the endorsement of the legislature, which last year gave itself the
final vote on major rule changes proposed by the board.

Financial backing from the legislature was widely viewed last week
as vital to the success of the plan.

"The rules themselves are not going to accomplish these changes,''
said Lyle A. Baker, an associate superintendent of the Minneapolis
schools. "There has to be a legislative package of incentives to make
them work.''

Members of the task force last week were pessimistic about their
proposal's chances before the legislature, however, especially in light
of the amount of money involved.

Anticipating legislative resistance, the task force struggled over
the question of whether districts should lose all of their state aid
for each student who transfers.

The plan calls for sending districts to receive an amount equal to
half the transferring pupil's state-aid allotment. The cost of similar
provisions has led to their deletion from previous open-enrollment
bills, however.

Task-force members said their proposal, which also calls for
Minneapolis and St. Paul to try to attract white students from the
suburbs, has little chance of achieving metropolitan desegregation
without substantial state expenditures on new magnet schools to lure
students across district lines.

"I know of no place in the country where students voluntarily leave
their own districts in any significant number without good reason,''
said Superintendent Lowell D. Larson of the Richfield district. "There
has to be a very attractive program to induce that kind of
movement.''

A Fair Burden?

Another provision of the task-force proposal would exempt schools
established by sovereign Native American tribes, as well as schools on
reservations. But districts far from the Twin Cities that have racially
unbalanced schools would be required to devise desegregation plans.

Robert J. Wedl, an assistant commissioner of the state education
department, last week said that the board is likely to change a
provision of the plan that requires the districts involved to accept
transferring students regardless of space considerations.

Superintendent Douglas W. Otto of the Anoka-Hennepin school system
said his district, where 6 percent of the 38,000 students are members
of minority groups, already is growing at a rate of 1,000 students a
year and can barely cope with current space demands.

Mr. Wedl also predicted that the task force's proposal would be
changed so that school reconstitutions would be carried out by
districts, rather than the state.

Even so, the plan's student-achievement requirements and
reconstitution provisions still are likely to face sharp criticism from
suburban educators. "Once again, we are assigning to education the task
of righting a situation whose roots are in all kinds of other forms of
discrimination,'' Mr. Larson said.

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